African Languages?

Open Forum
1

I was thinking about including more African languages here on Lingq.

We have Swahili and Afrikaans, but what about Amharic, Hausa, and Somali, to give only a few examples? These languages have massive populations of L1 speakers. After all, if we can include dead and constructed languages in the Lingq portfolio, why not some more African ones?

I’m sure it wouldn’t be too difficult to find someone to help us with the necessary content to make this happen - would there be interest in these languages or others from the African continent?

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2

I would love to have Shona (Native to Zimbabwe and parts of southern Africa) on LingQ. There is a very big Zimbabwean diaspora around the world, so I’m sure LingQ could find people to contribute.

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3

I second that, ChiShona is so beautiful

I actually made Afrikaans happen, and despite, perhaps being the most well supported native African language. It’s extremely difficult to find resources that facilitates learning on LingQ. The biggest problem in my experience was two-fold. 1. Lack of online dictionaries, this is the life-blood of LingQ. Before AI translations could do it automatically it took minutes to find a translation of a word.
Now with AI this is so much easier, but question is if it’s as helpful in other languages.
2. Lack of already present language learning materials and other native language content. Just googling books in KiSwahili has been hard, one of my Motswana friends mentions that a lot of Botswanan literature is just written in English for the broader market. So that too offers a problem.

That said, I do not say this to discourage anyone, but merely to prepare them. It took a year for me to be able to add Afrikaans, and another to be able to actually learn it efficiently. It was worth it, and now I see hundreds of learners of the language who have it so much easier to learn the language than I ever did!

If you or anyone reading this is interested in adding a language on LingQ they do have a guide available. New Languages on LingQ The requirements are very easy if you find someone actually willing to put in the work. If you already have that you could be done in less than a month with readying all materials.

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